I am an MIS major at my college and I have an associates in Web-Development. Currently I am the head of the Web Development/Application Development/Database Administration/Graphic Design Branch of the Company (vs the I.T. consulting, helpdesk, etc...) It's a small company.
I am the lead application developer and project manager. I've been witht this company 2 years and I have 5 years professional programming experience.
The reason I say all of this is because I also wasn't sure about the MIS thing, unlike you, I love programming and I wanted to stick to that, but this applies to hardware as well. What I have found is, the higher "up" on the ladder you are, the more decisions you get to make about your future. I would say stick with it for now, give it another 6 months, maybe a year. Look for opportunites to get into the hardware side of the company. Definately get your A+.
As a side note, I don't know if it gets a whole lot more technical than the programming
.
I have a couple people that I manage, one of them I know doesn't care for programming. Thats primarily what I have him doing, because thats what we need, but he loves security. So, whenever possible, I put him on the parts of the application or site we're working on that involve encryption and cryptography. If the opportunity arises that we need someone in security only, I'll probably move him on over there. Maybe you should make your supervisor aware that you love the hardware aspect of it.
As long as it doesn't interfere with your current workload, ask your supervisor if he can put you on any hardware related issues the company has, even data recovery or ghosting drives would be a start.
Basically what I'm saying in this really long winded post (that I was logged out of in the middle of writing), is that I aggree with Ã88. You should do the best with what you're doing now, be open minded but also express an interest (and more importantly: competency) in hardware and you might get lucky. If you don't after another year or so, maybe then you should look for another company.
But yes, on the strictly hardware side of things, there isn't a terrible amount of money to be made because it's cheaper to buy a new one (usually) than it is to fix it.